One Life.No One Left Behind.Why the Disability Autonomy and Homeownership Act Matters

Each of us gets one life.

There’s no practice round, and nobody gets a second try at their twenties or their forties. Every year someone spends trapped in a system that holds them back is a year they don’t get back.

Right now, millions of Americans with disabilities are living their one life inside rules that were built to keep them small. Small savings. Small homes, when they have a home at all. Small choices about who helps them, where they live, and whether they can marry the person they love.

We are going to change that, and we are going to do it together.

That’s why I released the Disability Autonomy and Homeownership Act as a public discussion draft. Here’s why it matters, what it does, and why the road we’re on now can’t continue.

Look at the numbers we’ve accepted as normal.

In 2026 the maximum federal SSI payment is $994 a month for one person. That is the most you can get, and the average check is lower still. (AARP, Disability Secrets)

On that income, the law says you can’t hold more than $2,000 in savings. That limit was set in 1989 and has never been adjusted for inflation. $2,000 in 1989 is worth more than $5,000 today. Congress never voted to cut it. It just let inflation eat it year after year, and called that stability. (Justice in Aging)

The income rules are older still. The basic earned-income disregard has stayed at the same level since SSI started in 1974. (CBPP)

Then there’s marriage. Two people on SSI who marry get $1,491 a month as a couple, which is about $500 less than they’d get as two single people. The couple’s asset limit is $3,000, not $4,000. So the system tells disabled Americans that loving someone will cost them. (AARP)

Stack it all up and you get this:

None of this is a mystery. Everyone knows what a stable life takes:

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990. In 1999, in Olmstead v. L.C., the Supreme Court held that unnecessarily segregating people with disabilities in institutions is discrimination. The principle has been settled law for a quarter century. What we’ve lacked is the structure to back it up: the income, the housing, and the support that turn a right on paper into a life.

This Act is that structure.

I won’t tell you this pays for itself. The draft says plainly that savings alone will not fund it. Core benefits are funded as mandatory entitlements. The revenue options we’ve identified include general revenue, a federal assessment on very large single-family home portfolios, reform of investor tax preferences, and fraud recovery. Final numbers need official CBO and OMB scoring, and we’ll publish them.

The question was never whether we can afford to do this. We’re already paying for the consequences of not doing it. The question is whether we keep paying for people to fail or start investing in them to rise.

Some people will look at a plan like this and try to scare you. They’ll say it costs too much, it’s too big, it’s too different.

Fear has held this country back for too long. It’s the reason a savings limit from 1989 still governs people’s lives in 2026. It’s the reason a disabled couple still pays a penalty to get married. It’s the reason people are still waiting on lists for the care that would keep them in their own homes.

Change isn’t the danger here. The danger is staying where we are.

So don’t let anyone place that fear on you. Look at what’s actually in front of us: one life each, and a system that makes millions of people spend theirs asking permission to live it.